What is a Shared Account?

Shared accounts represent a source of printing expense. They allow printing costs to be recorded or charged back to the source, with possible uses including:

• Allocating printing expenses to a department
• Charging printing expenses back to a client or job
• Allocating printing expenses to a particular project or phase
• Any other situation where printing would benefit from categorization

Printing is charged to shared accounts as follows:

1. An administrator / manager creates an account (or the account is imported from another source)
2. Users charge printing to the account (via popup client software)
3. Printing records and reports are automatically available, allowing costs to be charged back to the client (for example)

Some organizations will be most interested in charging printing to shared accounts. Examples often include legal, accounting, consulting, design, architecture and engineering firms. PaperCut NG (with advanced cost allocation options) was specifically designed for these type of organizations, and includes features that make it easy to work with large numbers of shared accounts.

Other organizations will be more interested in tracking which user printed. They may make some use of shared accounts (e.g. to charge printing to the department printing budget), or might not use them at all. Examples often include schools, colleges, universities, government organizations and businesses other than those mentioned above. PaperCut NG is designed to meet the needs of these type of organizations. It includes features to work with and charge to shared accounts, but not to the advanced level of PaperCut NG with Professional Client Billing options .

Can I restrict Users to individual limits within an account?
It is not currently possible to restrict individuals access to the overall account budget, by setting individual budgets within the account budget. So all users will each have access to spend any credit in any account they have been given access to.

If restricting users in this way is important to you, then there are solutions available via advanced scripting - however the on-going administration required on this script solution is high, and should be considered before implementing it. If you wish to discuss a scripted solution for this, please contact your reseller!

More Information:

• Account Based Tracking in the PaperCut tour
• Shared Accounts chapter of the PaperCut user manual